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Performing Revolution 141
in which the general level of dissatisfaction with the revolution was sharpened
by poverty and remoteness, and its threat of stirring up local sentiment
was probably among the reasons why it was eventually blocked.
The question of “the public” has dogged much progressive art of the twentieth
century, in which the aim to engage broadly with the concerns and
realities of people excluded by the high borders of high culture has mostly
proven elusive. In Cuba, while the overall dilemma is shared, the speciWc
contours of the situation are distinct.
The idea of an expanded public audience for art is coextensive
with a vision of assimilating artistic practice into social practice, and of art
as integrated into and integral to the emancipatory project of the revolution.
However, Cuban cultural policy has been riddled with contradictions, notably
that it has left bourgeois ideas of high culture intact and dominant (for
example, the national ballet is one of the country’s premier cultural institutions;
the national museum showcases painting and sculpture, with almost
no space devoted to the various more popular forms of visual creation on
the island) and meanwhile banalized the interpretation and participation of
“the masses” according to directives that coincide with the ideological formulations
of the state. This “reductivist, paternalistic and demagogic use of
the concept and image of ‘the people’ and its applications in the cultural Weld
(‘art for the people,’ ‘elitist art,’ ‘popular taste,’ ‘popular sensibility,’ etc.)” 130
meant that the populist agendas of the young artists were in direct conXict
with the cultural “massiWcation” programs of Cuban state socialism. Moreover,
unlike in capitalist countries, in Cuba the ranks of artists and other
intellectuals have been Wlled by people who are, “by origin, formation and
vocation, an essential part of Cuban society,” 131 which makes the social segregation
of high culture an even more twisted topography, since popular participation
for the artists was a matter of reaching across rather than down.
(Nonetheless, ideas of an artistic avant-garde and other formulations that
place artists at some remove from the general population have persisted in
Cuba, alongside socialist ethics: even Arte Calle, the most explicitly interactive
and populist of the groups, worked more with an eye toward destabilizing
the habitual than fomenting real dialogue. 132 This is an interesting
paradox: the same group that aspired to radical socialism conceived of their
participation in that process as one in which they were not exactly part of
the social body, but rather a kind of outside irritant.)
The signiWcant gap between what the revolution extolled and
what it administered as cultural policy was catalytic: many artists felt passionately
about the possibility of being part of building a truly integrated, revolutionary
culture, “demystiWed and desanctiWed” not in order to be recruited